2014-01-29

HiR is hosting a TW2002 contest. Fire up your telnet clients, pick a throwaway password you'll never use for anything else, and join us.

The contest game (Game B) is a TW2002 Gold game with very few modifications, a 5,000 sector universe and 1,000 turns per day. 5 deaths eliminates you. The contest opens on February 1st, with a 14 day entry window. No admittance after that. No prizes other than bragging rights, but it should be fun.

In the meantime, a sandbox (Game A) is in session for your amusement and a
bit of practice. It offers 5,000 turns per day to really give you a lot of time to explore and get your bearings straight with how the game works. I'm sure some of you are kind of rusty. I'll probably reset it in about two weeks when the entry period for the contest game closes.

All of the "Forgotten Ages" verbiage is a hold-over from the telnet MUD/BBS my wife ran back in the early 2000s. We've had licenses for Trade Wars and TWGS for a long time, and decided to finally put them to use.

Play clean, or play dirty. There are a lot of glitches and loopholes in this relic of a game. They're yours to use if you can find them.

2014-01-28

OpenVAS can be tricky to set up. Once OpenVAS packages are installed, there's a bunch of steps you need to perform, and in a pretty specific order, to turn it into a working vulnerability scanner. There are four parts to OpenVAS: The Scanner service, the Manager service, the Administrator service, and then some front-end client. In this case, I'm demonstrating Greenbone Security Assistant, which is yet another service, an SSL web UI that you can access locally, or from another computer, for managing OpenVAS.

I recommend using sudo instead of doing everything as root, but you're obviously not obliged to do it that way. These instructions presume you are using sudo, though. Sudo isn't in the Arch base distribution, but you can add it with:

[root@spx ~]# pacman -S sudo

First, install all the packages. gsa is the web UI, while gsd is a graphical client that runs under X11. You don't need to install both of them, but I usually do. A bunch of dependencies will be added with these packages. Stuff in bold is what I typed. Everything else is terminal output. Most of the really verbose output is truncated and noted with my own commentary in ellipses.

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y:: Retrieving packages ...Next, download all the OpenVAS NVT scripts. These are updated frequently. By default, OpenVAS doesn't ship with any scripts, so you need to download them. If there are no NVTs, OpenVAS scanner service doesn't like to start.

[axon@spx ~]$ sudo openvas-nvt-sync... lots of text while the NVT scripts download ...zyxel_pwd.nasl.asc[i] Download complete[i] Checking dir: ok[i] Checking MD5 checksum: okNext, make the SSL Cert for OpenVAS with this handy script: [axon@spx ~]$ sudo openvas-mkcertAnswer each prompt if you want, but as this is a private-use certificate, I usually just hit enter at all the prompts to accept the defaults. We also need to make a Client Cert for OpenVAS-Manager (om) like this:[axon@spx ~]$ sudo openvas-mkcert-client -n om -i... Write out database with 1 new entriesData Base UpdatedUser om added to OpenVAS.Start the OpenVAS Scanner service. This can take a really long time, and consumes a lot of RAM. [axon@spx ~]$ sudo openvassdLoading the OpenVAS plugins...base gpgme-Message: Setting GnuPG homedir to '/etc/openvas/gnupg'base gpgme-Message: Using OpenPGP engine version '2.0.22'Loading the plugins... 1887 (out of 33836)

The OpenVAS Manager service requires an SQLite database, but none is created during package installation. Use the following command to create the database. It will sit there for a few minutes and return to the command line without saying anything. This is normal. [axon@spx ~]$ sudo openvasmd --rebuild

Add a user to OpenVAS. You'll log into OpenVAS with these credentials. Pick a strong password, not the one I use here. [axon@spx ~]$ sudo openvasad -c 'add_user' -n adminusername -w adminpasswordad main:MESSAGE:4484:2014-01-28 14h31.41 CST: No rules file provided, the new user will have no restrictions.ad main:MESSAGE:4484:2014-01-28 14h31.41 CST: User adminusername has been successfully created.Start the OpenVAS Administrator service.[axon@spx ~]$ sudo openvasad I'm
usually paranoid, and at this step, I check the process list for
"openvas" services. You should see openvassd, openvasad and openvasmd
all running. If not, look at the logs in /var/log/openvas to give you some hints, or check to make sure you performed each step necessay. If that all checks out, start a client, such as Greenbone Security Assistant.[axon@spx ~]$ sudo gsad

Now just browse to https://localhost (or your BlackArch's network IP). You'll need to accept the self-signed certificate. Generating a new SSL cert for GSA is beyond the scope of this article.

2014-01-27

I've always admired Arch Linux, the spartan and light-weight Linux distro with its rolling release and clever package management system. At the same time, a lot of the security tools I know and love are difficult to compile, and found in few package repositories outside of Kali Linux, the Debian-derived distro that comes packed with pretty much every open-source security and penetration-testing tool that's relevant to today's researchers... and that's part of the problem. It's fun to play with new tools on occasion, but I rarely want or need all that stuff installed at once. Also, while I've spent more than enough time on Debian-family Linux distros thanks to a job managing Ubuntu LTS servers and hand-holding various friends and family through Ubuntu on desktops, it never quite felt like home as much as Arch does.

Enter BlackArch Linux, a package repository for arming your Arch Linux box to the teeth with all our favorite tools. There's also a collection of Live images to play with if that's more your style, but this relatively young project offers an appealing choice to those who prefer Arch.
Getting BlackArch up and running is pretty straightforward.

I prefer to start with a basic Arch Linux installation. For the command-line adept and those familiar with Arch, the Arch Installation Guide is a no-nonsense checklist of things you need to do, while the Beginners' Guide offers a bit more hand-holding. I used both when getting back into Arch Linux a while ago. You'll need to partition your drive, format the filesystems, pacstrap it, set up the network, add a user, and some other basic things that are outlined in the guides. Installation difficulty is on par with OpenBSD, but with a little less guidance from a dedicated install script. Don't forget to set up a boot loader!

You'll probably want to customize your Arch Linux install, which may include setting up X11, a Display Manager and a Window Manager or Desktop Environment (handy for using a graphical web browser or GUI-driven tools such as BurpSuite). That's all covered in the Beginners' guide as well. I'm pretty fond of OpenBox with Conky, so I ended up with a pretty minimalist desktop, shown here.

Once you have Arch installed and a comfortable userland configured, you'll want to make sure it's up to date by running "pacman -Syu" and then you should install wget before moving on to installing BlackArch, if you haven't already:

pacman -S wget

From there, you can simply follow the instructions on the BlackArch Download page. This will just add the repositories to your Arch Linux installation, and doesn't actually install the packages. You can opt to install all the packages at once with:

pacman -S blackarch

But in my opinion, the fact that you can pick and choose which tools to install makes it quite nice for devices like netbooks or other machines that you really don't want bogged down with hundreds of tools you don't need. The BlackArch download page outlines how to peruse their repository for the stuff you want, or installing groups of similar packages, such as "blackarch-scanner" and "blackarch-networking"

In my next post, I'll explain how to configure OpenVAS, and get it up and running on BlackArch. I frequently set this up in my security lab when introducing interns to vulnerability scanning, and it's usually a bit tricky to get running for the first time.

2014-01-24

A few years ago, I bought a new gas can. I noticed it doesn't have a ventilation hole, but I figured there was some magic in the bizarre spout design that made ventilation unnecessary. I figured wrong. It takes several minutes to empty two gallons into a vehicle. I got tired of it today.

Step 1: Acquire useless gas can.
Step 2: Drill a small pilot hole in the handle, somewhere that won't leak when the can is full or in use.
Step 3: Plug said hole with a thumscrew, wing bolt or other suitable, secure device.

Loosely illustrated in attached photos. This works much better, but 1) might not be as safe for transporting gasoline, 2) might get you in trouble with some all-seeing government agency. As always: We're not responsible for problems caused by people who try this at home.

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About HiR

HiR is what happens when 1990s-era e-Zine writers decide to form a blog. Most of us hail from the Great Plains region of the United States.

Ax0n, HiR founder and editor-in-chief is an information security specialist currently working in the luxury goods industry.

Asmodian X joined HiR in December 1997 and currently works as a web developer and SysAdmin in the education industry.

Frogman has been on board since May 1998 and has many technical passions. When not experimenting with obscure hardware, he can be found leaping from one rooftop to the next, making the world his office.

TMiB has also been helping since 1998. Also our resident Physicist and go-to guy for xkcd jokes we don't get, The Man in Black currently works in the Internet industry in an east-coast data center.